AT HOME WITH: TOM ASHBROOK; A Midlife Leap Finds A Cushioned Landing

THE last time I saw Tom Ashbrook, he was scraping off dirty plates in my college dining room at Yale and regaling those of us on the serving line with wild stories about working the Alaskan pipeline and fixing sheep on his father's Illinois farm. His experiences were so out of my suburban-bred league. I noticed, even with a hair net, he had a great ponytail.

He headed off on a scholarship to China, and I heard that he was a rising star reporter covering Asia for The Boston Globe. Then last month, his first book, ''The Leap'' (Houghton Mifflin), was published, and I found out that Tom Ashbrook was now worth, on paper at least, a few million as the co-founder of Homeportfolio.com, a leading home-furnishing Web site.

''The Leap'' is a highly personal account of one man's cure for a not particularly warranted midlife crisis: first, dump a thriving career as a journalist (after the paper gave him a year off to pursue a Nieman Fellowship); then with no experience, no dependable financing and a wife stunned almost to disbelief, start an Internet company with a college buddy, Rolly Rouse. Its mission? A Web site edition of ''Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Your Home but Were Afraid to Think About.''

The reviewers of the book have responded emotionally. Time called it a ''gut-wrenching suspense.'' The Washington Post wrote: ''Ashbrook comes across as the kind of guy you'd definitely want to invest your money in, might possibly want to work for, but wouldn't want to be married to or the child of.'' Readers who penned reviews for Amazon.com were generally positive, with one wanting to know when Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman were going to snap up the movie rights.

As for Homeportfolio.com, it recently received $48 million in financing from investors that include HGTV, CondeNet and the Meredith Corporation. The shortfalls of e-commerce haven't affected the Web site, a guide for locating and comparing information about home products that is not dependent on retail business.

So the story seemed to have a happy ending. But what had happened between dining hall cleanup and Internet gold rush? Between stumbling upon Imelda Marcos's shoe closet while covering the Philippines and manning a booth at a home-builder trade show? Mr. Ashbrook was also a witness to the grim realities of civil war and revolution in India, Bosnia and Rwanda. These were not places for a sunny personality.

''I have a romantic disposition, and it was tested by some of what I saw as a journalist,'' Mr. Ashbrook said at his home in Newton, Mass., a suburb of Boston, where he lives with his wife, Danielle Guichard-Ashbrook, an assistant dean for graduate education at M.I.T., and their three children. ''Maybe part of my reason for leaving was a form of self-preservation.''

First, the ponytail is gone. But Mr. Ashbrook, at 44, still has that golden-boy look, albeit on a slightly heftier scale. ''I've always valued the important things like family,'' he said, warming up to the tale of why he joined the electronic revolution. ''At the same time, I always wanted adventure, even more than risk.''

The book opens with a Jerry Maguire-like scene, night sweats and all, as the author contemplates a change of life while on assignment in Africa. ''Deep in a career, in a life, I was unbuckling, eyeing the exits, ready to walk on the wing,'' he writes. The book then chronicles the ride as he and Mr. Rouse careen through the perils and pitfalls of a start-up: hitting up relatives for their first $20,000; running up over a quarter of a million dollars in credit card debt. Which would be the first to run out: the money or the wife?

It all became the stuff of storytelling for Mr. Ashbrook. And now, four years later, he's talking with the same breathless delivery about another kind of crisis, the sort brought on by the perils of trying to fix up a house. Having observed focus groups with women, he said: ''They all had the same complaints. The renovation took over their life. And they were all afraid that the designers were going to take control of their projects.''

Homeportfolio started out in a guest bedroom in Mr. Rouse's house and now, with over 100 employees, sprawls over an entire former church a few minutes from Mr. Ashbrook's home. Mr. Ashbrook's office is on the top floor, tucked under the eaves. Other employees have views of neo-Gothic arches and stained glass windows; Mr. Ashbrook's is decorated in High Nondescript. One corner is a kind of shrine to his journalism days. There's a Boston Globe photograph of a refugee in Somalia and his camel, and a large inscription in Chinese. It says something to the effect that the effort put into a beautiful brush stroke conveys all that one needs to know, and Mr. Ashbrook translated it with the vernacular ease you'd expect from someone who used to moonlight dubbing kung fu movies into English.

Was the thrill still palpable, now that the business was running, well, like a business? ''It's not in the same giddy wide-eyed way the book chronicles,'' he said. ''The book is about a historical moment in time that I'm sure Americans will look back on for centuries as one of our gold rush eras as much as the Klondike era was. My own behavior and response was absolutely in line with thousands of men a century ago. Was I caught up in the mania as they were? Yes, I was! But as the dust settles, I think the Internet may be undersold as to what its ultimate impact will be.''

Not exactly a straight answer, but then, Homeportfolio.com is still hedging its bets: the founders have not yet attempted to take the site public. Brian Carroll, the e-commerce editor of Furniture Today, a trade magazine, said: ''Their content is rich. More important, they've shown marked improvement since the launch, without a lot of fits and starts. They've got all the necessary ingredients to become a player.''

While Mr. Ashbrook has always been the frontman -- the raconteur talking up the business -- it was Mr. Rouse who had the original eureka moment for a Web site on home renovation. Over time, it evolved into an open-ended, exhaustive resource for finding home products (they show 40 chaise longues, for example, compared with two or three on a rival site).

Mr. Rouse was the one who truly cared about dormers and doorknobs. How did it feel to have his tale optioned by someone else? ''At first flush, it was kind of hard and something I had to get over, but how much more loving account of yourself and your child could you possibly want?'' Mr. Rouse said.

Mr. Ashbrook wanted to hitch a ride to the Internet, the rougher the better. ''I drank the Kool-Aid early on, and it never wore off, even when no money was left, and we could barely buy groceries,'' he said, adding that his wife, Danielle, wondered ''if I'd lost my marbles.''

During the 10 years her husband was based overseas, Ms. Guichard-Ashbrook worked with Vietnamese boat people for the United Nations. The book portrays her as the former high school sweetheart and ever-loyal helpmate. While she was his campaign manager when he ran for student council president, she bridles somewhat at her simplified portrait in ''The Leap.''

''I come off as the predictable one,'' Ms. Guichard-Ashbrook said by phone on her way to deliver a lecture in San Diego. ''I'm a little disturbed by the stand-by-your-man image. I see myself as more progressive and interesting than that.''

Looking back over the last three years, she recalled, ''Personally, the absolutely lowest moment came when Tom excused himself from a huge argument in order to take notes'' for his book. ''And then he came back and asked me to repeat something to make sure he'd got it right,'' she continued. ''He's lucky he lived through the night.''

The Ashbrook home in Newton is a handsome 1930's Tudor with a plastic pool in the driveway and a yellow Labrador panting by the kitchen door. The house is redolent of an odd blend of wanderlust and wholesomeness, filled with children's drawings and Asian imports from their travels. It has been years since they bought their last piece of furniture. Clearly, obsessing over their home is not the high priority it is for the people who visit Homeportfolio.com.

Toward dusk, Mr. Ashbrook jumped up to go pick up dinner from a Thai restaurant. ''So much of modern life is about seeking safety, and that's not all there is,'' he said, heading for the driveway. ''I'm sorry for the stress on my family, but on some basic level I don't want to apologize for the odyssey. Life should have some scary passages.''